Hailing from Sydney, Brad Eastman, usually known as Beastman to his fans, has graced walls all over the World. His pieces often depict weird and monstrous creatures, which are commonly symmetrical and painted in bold colours (especially blues and oranges).

Bring Forth the Beast

I have been making art ever since I was a kid; I guess I just never stopped following my creative interests. It took years of drawing and painting to develop a unique and original style that I was really interested in exploring further.

These days I spend most of my time in the studio, making acrylic paintings for exhibitions, I also paint wall murals regularly and create some of my work on the computer for t-shirt graphics, prints and other various projects. I had studied graphic design back in the late 90s, but have never had any formal training in painting. I really think it’s an important journey for an artist to go through, learning to paint and learning about different mediums and which best suits your own style or work.

I am usually painting in my studio, but when I paint a mural its usually either a private commission wall at a house, business or property, or it’s just a fun wall painting with friends over some beers somewhere.

I draw inspiration from the people around me. I’m driven by the other artists I work with and share my studio with we all work really hard to make a living from doing what we love. My artwork is generally inspired by nature, design, symmetry, mythology and the future.

When we asked Brad to describe his style he answered: I always find it really hard to answer this question… so I am not going to. I’m just really keen to evolve my work and always strive to take it in new directions.

The street art scene in Australia

The street art scene in Australia is great; there are a lot of amazing artists here. We’re all friends and we work together on different projects all the time. Because we are so isolated from the rest of the World here, it has forced us to create a really strong local art scene that we can rely on to make a living from our art.

Gallery Work and Exhibitions

I began to exhibit my work in 2005. I love painting small works; it’s what I started out doing in the first place. To me it’s a separate thing from painting walls and large scale works, it’s much more intimate, time consuming and also a more thought out process.

I have painted all over Australia and also in New Zealand, London, Berlin, Prague, Tel Aviv, Hong Kong, and New York. Everywhere is different to Australia, that’s why when I am abroad I can’t wait to come back to Sydney, I really feel blessed to have grown up in such an amazing city.

We asked Beastman his favourite location to paint, his answer was: “My studio - good people, good music, good times”.

The Opening Hours is a website I am now involved in which focuses on promoting contemporary, graffiti and street artists both from Australia and abroad. We are also planning on doing a lot more creative projects and exhibitions with local and international artists here in Australia. Check out the opening hour’s website here: http://theopeninghours.com.au

As for future projects, I have a few group exhibitions I’m involved in over the next few months I’m also heading to Perth to paint some walls, then to Brisbane to speak at a creative conference called Semi Permanent (http://www.semipermanent.com/event/brisbane). Aside from these things I’ll be working on The Opening Hours with my friends here in Sydney, while also doing some clothing collaborations with Element as well as trying to plan another solo exhibition somewhere for later this year, maybe in Hong Kong.